by Helen Jukes
‘I bet they can hear us,’ she says. The earth is dry. The air is cold. She turns her head and whispers something into the hive, but the hive doesn’t make a sound.
At the time of Huber’s writing, most scientists believed that honeybees were deaf. Unable to find ears or an auditory system like our own, they had assumed that bees were without hearing. But this posed a problem. How to explain the complexity of processes that went on inside the hive if bees were without ears and couldn’t see in the dark? Did they communicate by smell alone? And – if they couldn’t hear – why would they be making sounds? Not just buzzing but also hissing, quacking, tooting, piping, warbling, beeping; as measuring instruments became more advanced, more noises were added to the list. The scientists scratched their heads, and the bees tooted and hissed.
Then, just as with Huber’s investigations into the impregnation of the queen, one day a breakthrough came. The scientists lowered their eyes, away from the honeybee’s head, to her feet. This is where she listens; sound enters through the floor – through contact with things. Inside the hive she stands on the surface of the comb, and the comb shakes. Elsewhere, workers shake their abdomens against the comb; she senses this as a pulse rising through her feet and knees, and it signals to her that the colony is preparing to swarm. A shorter pulse will prompt a dancer to stop dancing; a similar movement on the body of a queen will inhibit laying. These vibrations, which are passed at the resonant frequency of the comb itself, can be heard by a honeybee despite the noisiness of the hive, and at a distance – the comb amplifies the sound. Detected by subgenual organs in each of her knees, the vibrations are converted into a nerve impulse and sent directly to her brain.
Next the scientists looked up again, to her antennae. Here she feels a back and forth. While human ears respond to changes in air pressure, her antennae detect air-particle oscillations. A wing beats, the air moves and she hears it. Sensitive to frequencies of up to 500 Hz, her antennae appear to have adapted to discern the 200–300 Hz frequencies produced by a dancing nestmate as she vibrates her flight muscles nearby. While the existence of these communication pathways is well recorded, the precise patterns of signal and response, and so also their functions inside the hive, are still not fully understood.
I may not be undergoing a transformation into a honeybee, but I like learning things like this because it stretches my range of the possible.
Dulcie shivers. We stand a moment and look up at the orange blur of light pollution seeping upwards from the horizon, thinning and bluing, soaking the night.
‘Not unbeautiful, is it?’ she says.
Our feet scuff at the too-dry earth. The garden seems narrower in the night: the trees over the fence blend with the warehouse roof so that they are more looming than in the day, and the traffic seems closer too.
There are times, not often, when a wall crumbles, a breakthrough comes, in a place you’d thought it wouldn’t. Sometimes this happens with a big announcement and a noisy fanfare but more often it comes quietly, as though slipping in through a side door, by way of no more than a pause or a shift in the conversation.
‘You should meet my friend,’ Dulcie says, glancing back at the hive as we turn and head for the house. ‘He’s a beekeeper too. Maybe we can all meet up when you’re in London next week. You two have just the same taste in furniture.’
I laugh and say that I didn’t know I had any taste in furniture but yes, okay, I will meet this beekeeper with the chairs that are just like mine. And a few seconds later we’re back in the house and the lights are on, it is our own faces we’re seeing reflected in the windows, and we are already talking about something else.
In the end, when the weekend of the Islington kitten-sit arrives, I am glad to get out. I go straight to the station after work and catch the train to London, then sit in my seat and watch as the view outside the window begins to crawl, and then to flow past. Soon everything is green and billowing.
It’s last-minute but anyway I begin texting friends to invite them over for a meal on Sunday night. I have the number of Dulcie’s beekeeping friend because she’s been trying to arrange a drink between the three of us, and without thinking about it too much I add his name to the list in the ‘to’ box and press ‘send’.
And then each of my friends, for different reasons, can’t make it. Dulcie can’t get a babysitter; Laurence has plans already. The third ate an old tin of tuna and has terrible food poisoning, and the fourth is on her way to Glasgow. The fifth and sixth say can we meet up tomorrow, it’d be much easier tomorrow. So then it is just Dulcie’s friend the beekeeper left. And he replies to say that’s kind, yes please, he knows that area well. He used to live just around the corner and he’ll be working not far from there on Sunday; it’d be very easy to come by after. I wonder if it is a little strange to invite a man I have never met before to a house I have never been in before, and I hope that he doesn’t mind pasta.
The friends who rent this house have just moved over from America so the place is sparse, and simple in the way that two graphic designers can make a place feel simple. The handles of all the mugs on the kitchen shelf are turned to forty-five degrees. The books are unbitten at the edges, and they have more pictures in them than words. The mantelpiece in the front room is the only place showing any sign of disorder – it’s crowded with toy cars and a plastic lion and pieces of bark and string, like the flotsam a bird might find and take to nest with.
I spend the weekend cycling around and seeing friends, playing with the kittens or else extricating myself from their claws. And then it is Sunday, and there I am waiting for Dulcie’s friend the beekeeper, hoping we’ll find something to talk about or that, if we don’t, he’ll leave quickly.
His hair is almost completely white. This is the first thing I notice when he arrives at the door, and it’s a surprise because he is only just about my age or a bit older. It changed colour when he was a teenager, he’ll tell me later. Something switched, and all the follicles in his head lost their colour. ‘Did something happen?’ I’ll ask, before thinking to censor myself. ‘I’ve wondered that too,’ he’ll say, cocking his head, sweeping his fringe to one side. His voice is quiet and sometimes I’ll strain to hear it.
But that will happen later. Right now he’s standing in the doorway; he has to duck his head to get in.
‘Dulcie told me you’re a beekeeper,’ I say, stepping back to let him through.
‘I’m not a beekeeper,’ he says as he takes off his shoes, ‘I don’t know where she got that idea.’ And then there is a pause. ‘My uncle’s a beekeeper,’ he offers. ‘Oh dear.’
I make tea as the kittens roll and scramble around our feet. There’s a slight crease to his frame that makes me think of lifting, not hunching, as if the bones in his shoulders are gathered close under his skin. It makes me think of the brittle chitin of bee wings, of those veins inside running right to the edges of them.
We eat roasted squash stirred up with some spinach and pasta and a few other things that I find in the fridge. It is not especially nice but it is a bit nice, with the green leaves and the bright-orange squash all mixed up on top of each other. Sometimes I think colour is as important as taste, I tell him, then wonder if that sounded pretentious or overly self-assured. He says he has a friend who eats different-coloured foods on different days, depending on her mood. Red foods on angry days, green on feeling-alive days, purple on sad days. Only there aren’t many purple foods, he says, so she doesn’t eat much on those days. Mostly just beetroot. I know someone who does the same thing with clothes, I tell him. I like beetroot, I say. He says so does he. His accent is Yorkshire, I think.
After the pasta is over we go into the room with the cluttered mantelpiece and I sit down on the floor instead of the sofa. Like this, I am at the same level as the kittens, which feels like a good place to be. He looks a bit confused, then sits down on the floor too. The kittens tug our jumpers with their claws.
‘Last autumn I did a course about being a psyc
hic,’ he says, then looks at me, surprised. ‘I haven’t told that to any of my friends.’
I narrow my eyes at him. He doesn’t look much like a psychic. ‘So can you read my mind?’ I joke, because I’m not sure I believe in psychic ability, and feel I should make that clear right away. But what he then describes is not so much about reading minds as developing a different kind of attention to things.
‘I’m not very articulate,’ he says, and stops. His eyes are very blue. ‘Let me show you.’
I have to stand with my eyes closed and my palms out in front of me, and try paying attention to what’s happening around me in the room. He’s going to stand at the opposite wall and begin walking slowly towards me; I have to open my eyes when I can ‘feel’ him. It’s a bit like the children’s game Grandmother’s Footsteps, except there’s no one around to shout ‘Wolf!’.
‘Sometimes you find you can sense a person even before your hands touch,’ he says. But the first thing I notice when I close my eyes is my own anxiety at the thought of something proximal and approaching.
‘I can’t do it,’ I say, and open them again. He hasn’t moved an inch. ‘I can’t tell the difference between my own nerves and what’s coming from around me.’
He grins. ‘Exactly. It’s about learning to discriminate.’
I notice he’s taking this seriously. I close my eyes again. Maybe, nearly, my palms feel something. And then suddenly we remember the curtains are open, and there are passers-by watching us from the street. Two people standing at opposite ends of a room, hands up like buffers at either end of a train track. And then two people doubled over laughing.
That night I dream there are holes in my feet. The holes don’t hurt; they are just there, newly opened and completely strange. I feel air moving beyond, inside the place my skin had sealed. In the dream I reach down, touch a hole, poke my finger in and twist. My right shoulder jumps and my ear twinges and a shiver runs right down the back of me.
The next morning I get up and leave early. At the station I hit rush hour, a thousand suits, announcements booming over loudspeakers and upraised faces as departure boards flash with destinations and times. I feel strangely vulnerable; I keep thinking I’m going to get knocked down. And my train is about to leave. I duck between umbrellas and luggage trolleys, slip through the barriers and squeeze into a carriage just as the doors are closing. The aisle is full of bags and bodies and elbows poking. Grey suits apologise and huff. We retrieve our screens and papers, lower our eyes, tuck our necks back inside our coat collars. The train pulls out of the station and I gather myself, take out my wad of photocopied letters from the British Library. By the time we’ve reached London’s outskirts I am already back in the eighteenth century.
Where Huber’s experiments began in a spirit of fascination and excited enquiry, they later take on a stranger tone. He and Burnens move in on the bees themselves, mutilating bodies, isolating them from their sensory capacities and observing the effects this has.
It is all in the name of science. There is nothing particularly unusual about his methods; you learn the function of a thing by noticing what changes when it’s gone. Huber has Burnens remove wings, pick an antenna off. Paint varnish over the eyes of workers to blind them. And, through Burnens, he begins to observe the effects this has – on the bees, on their behaviour and capabilities, and on the capabilities of the colony.
The descriptions in his letters are as vivid as ever, and alive with compassion and feeling. But in one experiment on a confined and mutilated queen his language slips again, and she seems to be accorded a whole personality, an inner life of her own. He has amputated her antennae. Without them she is unable to feel her way into cells for laying, and instead drop[s] her eggs haphazard[ly], without thinking (they scatter and fall, producing nothing). She shows symptoms of delirium. Unable to fit her eggs securely, she flees, seeking out the empty parts of the hive, its hidden corners, where she becomes motionless. A number of workers follow her in this solitude but she avoids them, rarely reaches for food, and, when she does, sends out her proboscis with an uncertain groping towards the heads and limbs of those in her vicinity.
Isolated from her sensory world, she becomes tormented with the desire of leaving. She rushes at the opening, and – finding it blocked – returns to the hive, indifferent to the care of those around her. When Huber and Burnens open the entrance she rushes again, and tries to fly, but – her belly swollen with unlaid eggs – she falls. The workers do not follow her. She dies.
I struggle to locate what it is I find so moving about this last description of the confined and mutilated queen. That, trapped, she panics; that the workers attempt to save her, to feed her; that she refuses to be fed. That this situation becomes unbearable; that her only option is to flee.
Huber wonders what it is that causes the workers to abandon her at this point, as she falls from the hive, but can draw no firm conclusions. Her instinct is changed, he writes, this is all that I perceive. I see nothing more.
The following week I learn about a contemporary version of Huber’s experiment happening right on my very own doorstep.
On Wednesday I meet Jack for a walk after work. He’s been busy. He’s got so interested in beekeeping, he’s started building hives with a group at a local community allotment. Every now and then he’s been coming to open the hive with me, and he wants to set another date for that too. And then there is a meeting to plan a summer music festival, and a gathering of the outdoor-swimming club at the weekend. He’s planning a trip this summer; he’s going to swim the length of the River Dart. ‘Of course, I’ll have to walk some of it,’ he adds. ‘Some of it is just a stream. Anyway, how are you?’
I can’t seem to shake the feeling this week that something’s missing. But I don’t tell that to Jack – it sounds too strange – so instead I tell him about the bees, that pollen the colour of grey-green mould that they’re still carrying in through the entrance.
‘That’ll be the raspberry flowers,’ he says. And then he gets out his phone and shows me a website he’s found, with colour charts to help identify pollen sources. ‘You match up the pollen colour to the chart, see? And then you get an idea of what they’re taking into the hive.’ We stop in a shop doorway to peer down at the palm-sized screen. And this is how I discover that just as I have been exploring further, so the bees have also been flying further, moving into more places than I’d thought. They’ve been inside hawthorn bushes and up horse-chestnut trees; somewhere or other they’ve even found a patch of raspberries.
Jack has recently joined a campaign to stop the use of neonicotinoids, a class of insecticide that first came into use in the UK around twenty years ago. Neonicotinoids work systemically. Unlike contact pesticides, which remain on the surface of treated foliage, neonicotinoids are taken up and transported to all parts of the plant, remaining active for many weeks and so removing the need for repeated treatments. You can look at a field of maize or a garden of flowers treated with neonics and you won’t notice anything unusual. Like gutta serena, that disease affecting one of Huber’s eyes, there is no sign of damage and no visible trace of anything altered. It’s the same with the insects neonics act upon. Working from the inside out, they penetrate the brains of insects, blocking receptor sites and exciting nerves, leading to eventual paralysis and death.
‘They were initially hailed as a safer alternative to other treatments,’ he says, as we slip off the pavement and down onto the canal towpath. ‘The pesticides would work discreetly, the manufacturers said. From the insides of plants, directly into the brains of insects – so they’d stay separate from the soil and water supply.’
A moorhen peeps. A duck lowers herself into the water, and five ducklings follow her.
‘It didn’t really work out that way,’ he says, and goes on to tell me how more and more evidence is coming to light to suggest that the effects are far more wide-ranging, and more dangerous, than was first thought. With their highly evolved nervous systems, honeybee
s are especially vulnerable to neonics; studies are finding that some of their key abilities are seriously impaired following exposure to the systemic pesticides, even at the relatively small doses that make it into the hive.
‘Like which abilities?’ I ask, kicking a pebble and watching as it trips over the gravel and plops into the grimy water.
‘Well, like communication,’ he says. ‘Homing and foraging ability. The way they learn. One study showed that neonics affected bees’ ability to tell which scents signified a ready food source. They were losing the ability to connect smell with meaning; that amazing system they have for perceiving and making sense of the world was starting to fail.’
There’s a new development of modern flats on the bank opposite, built in a semi-hexagon, so that all the windows face in towards each other, with a paved car park at its centre. I suppose the idea was to offer residents a canal-side location, but from here it looks more like a panopticon.
‘Honeybees aren’t solitary individuals,’ Jack says, as we watch a man drive into the car park through a security gate with a keypad that he pushes a code into. ‘Their ability to function as part of a social group is crucial. And when something’s getting blocked – when the capacity of individuals to communicate and learn is being impaired – well, it impacts the whole colony. Lots of colonies. However many colonies are living across a whole area.’
It sounds like one great big experiment into the severance and confusion of the senses, and it makes me sad, and I wonder what will happen to the bees.
We’ve walked as far as the edge of the city, which doesn’t take long really, and now we stand and look at what comes after it. There are electricity pylons and fields. A tractor must be moving along somewhere, because there’s a soft plume of dust rising, a spray of gulls circling above it.